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Film
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Breakin' All the Rules
Jamie Foxx’s latest film lives up to its title by deconstructing sex comedies and bringing a much needed dose of intelligence to a typically slow-witted genre.
Friday, May 14, 2004
By Todd Gilchrist
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It’s a shame black-themed dramas don’t do better at the box office; movies like Love & Basketball and Brown Sugar toil in relative obscurity and are pegged as “intellectual” (read: uncommercial), while moronic comedies like All About the Benjamins and the Friday series clean up the table scraps left after Hollywood’s blockbusters have provided their populist pabulum. It’s worth noting that actor Sanaa Lathan starred in the two misses and Ice Cube in the hits; what that says about them, I’m not completely sure, but for my money, the connection must be that their relative success is inversely proportionate to the level of talent on screen.
Be that as it may, the overall end result, sadly enough, is more of the latter and fewer of the former; lots of comedies that say ‘men are philandering dogs, and women are heartless schemers, ain’t that funny?’ and a piddling number of dramas that attempt to evoke the rhythms of real life between men and women, be they funny, tragic, or heartbreaking.
Breakin’ All the Rules, surprisingly enough, falls somewhere into the crevasse between these two extremes. It’s funny because of star Jamie Foxx, who always seems to be trying to play off constant, inescapable humiliation with his hair-trigger sense of humor. It’s also kind of sweet because of Foxx’s love interest, played by Gabrielle Union, who is so effortlessly and endlessly captivating that it has become a constant source of disappointment that she hasn’t yet ascended to the success level of her less talented but more bankable leading-lady competition.
Together, the pair gets it about half right, and though Breakin’ All the Rules adheres pretty closely to the conventions of romantic comedy formula, the movie proves to be a more charming examination of male-female relations than one might imagine the genre was capable of.
Foxx is Quincy, a magazine editor who writes a guidebook for breakups after being dismissed by his fickle fiancée Helen (Bianca Lawson), who absconds with his best man at their engagement party and flees to Paris. Heartbroken but impossibly successful, Quincy lives a romantic life vicariously through his lothario cousin Evan (Morris Chestnut), who adheres strictly to a three-month time limit on relationships; when his current flame Nicky (Union) suddenly drops those five terrifying little words (“Baby, we need to talk”) just days before his own planned break-up, Evan seeks Quincy’s help to reset the supposed balance of power and restore his status as resident ladies’ man.
Due to a series of mix-ups both small and large, Quincy’s interception of Nicky hits a snag when he accidentally falls for her; they hit it off immediately, and the pair seem destined to end up together except for the fact that Quincy has no idea she is in fact the woman he was sent to break up with (she got a haircut - don’t ask).
At the same time, Quincy’s sheepish editor Phillip (Peter MacNicol) is trying to break it off with his gold-digging girlfriend Rita (Jennifer Esposito), who sees through Quincy’s strategies and confronts him, hoping to turn his scheming to her advantage. Unfortunately, Evan is pretending to be Quincy (he thinks she’s a book groupie – again, don’t ask) and before long this little love triangle has grown to exponential proportions.
Breakin’ All the Rules, as far as memory serves, is the first film in which one of these sex comedies (well, black sex comedies, anyway) has boasted a leading man who is more sensitive than snarky, more considerate than calculating. What makes the movie work is Foxx not as the African-American ubermensch, the stone cold player who seduces women out of their panties with but a single furtive glance, but Foxx as a guy who was wrecked when his girlfriend dumped him, and who pours that hurt into a creative endeavor that was inevitably (and to be fair, expectedly) misinterpreted as a way to shuffle off the responsibilities of modern relationships.
Foxx gives Quincy humanity, and more importantly, a vulnerability that inures our sympathy, even after we’ve been treated to a seemingly never-ending series of line-up changes and double, triple and quadruple crosses. He manages to make the inevitable romantic victory at the end of the film feel more like a well earned reward rather than some sort of foregone conclusion.
Gabrielle Union first pinged the moviegoing public’s radar after she brought “it” to the 2000 teen comedy Bring It On; since then she’s appeared in numerous romantic comedies and ever-larger mainstream vehicles, and always proved herself a worthy screen partner, whether she’s waging a battle of the sexes (Deliver Us From Eva) or a war against Miami Drug lords (Bad Boys II).
Here again, she contributes a much needed emotional center to proceedings that are largely bereft of much more than throwaway punchlines, and makes Nicky a woman worth fighting for. Mind you, her competition runs the male screenwriter’s modern-day gamut of female roles - an empty headed sexpot (Lawson), a money-hungry shrew (Esposito) and a commitment-obsessed (and single, natch) co-worker (Jill Ritchie). But in these types of movies, an even-tempered, intelligent and sexy woman is damn hard to find, and Union provides all of those things and more for Quincy - and the audience - to fall in love with.
| Breakin’ All the Rules ultimately acquiesces to the laws of attraction defined in prede~cessors like How to Be a Player and Two Can Play that Game, connecting and correcting pairs until they fit right in the audience’s eyes and ushering conciliations and comeuppances to deserving parties. At the same time, the film, which was written and directed by Daniel Taplitz, doesn’t place convenient categorizations of good or bad on his cavalcade of wannabe lovers, and seems to want to see everyone happy (except the empty-headed sexpot) once the closing credits roll.
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Though I wasn’t completely sold on the cleanliness with which the film’s loose ends are tied, I was begrudgingly impressed. With such a sly and surprisingly effective sidestep of the conventions of the comedies from whose berth this film came, one could almost call Breakin’ All the Rules intelligent.
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